Find out what's new on our websites, where we've been, what's on our minds and the things we're doing.
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To Hell with Prizes
Posted Thursday April 29th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaIn the middle of Bloomsbury, there’s an Old Dairy. I’ve walked around for about ten minutes trying to find it round the back of the Brunswick Centre. Finally I spy a pebbled path down into a converted barn and there I spy absolutely everyone in publishing: there’s author Grant Gillespie, there’s DBC Pierre, there’s Andrew o’Hagan... hold on, is that Francis Bickmore from Canongate? No, is that Hanif Kureishi? To add to that, a very glamorous India Knight, Preeya Kalidas from Eastenders, Kwame Kwei-Armah from off the telly and Booktrust writer-in-residence Evie Wyld talking to ex-model and writer Gavin James Bower- it’s a who’s who of publishing. All the agents and editors are here. And for what? It’s a Sunday night, it’s the Sunday night before London Book Fair- what is everyone doing? It’s To Hell with Prizes, a new award from new uber-cool publishing imprint To Hell With Publishing, whio have their own printing press in their own Bloomsbury shop, To Hell with Books- you get the idea.
We’re here for the announcement of the prize, which is £5,000 and a To Hell with Publishing limited edition for the best book, and the obvious hope is that the author…
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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize panel at Free the Word!
Posted Tuesday April 27th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaLast weekend, in the streaming sun, the summery vibes were all over the south bank with ice creams, bicycles, outdoor eating, drinking and merriment. Four floors up in Royal Festival Hall, in the Weston Pavillion with a gorgeous view over the London Eye and Houses of Parliament, we sat in on the Independent Foreign Fiction prize panel.
Chaired by Gary McKeone, it featured Daniel Hahn, one of this year’s judges and a seasoned translator in his own right; Maureen Freely, most known for her work with Booker-winner Orhan Pamuk; and Anne Mcclane standing in for Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who was a victim of volcanic ash. It was a breezy affair in a hot room.
As part of International Pen’s Free the Word! Festival, it took place alongside more high profile events like conversations with Richard Ford and webcasts with Chinua Achebe, but this, for me, felt like the highlight. So much of the translated fiction over the days of the festival highlighted the beauty of the words and the celebration of other cultures, but this panel placed the focus on the ones who seemingly have the hardest work: the translators.
To highlight this, Daniel Hahn told a particularly poignant and…
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The Winter House... a new kind of short story
Posted Friday April 23rd 2010
by Nikesh Shukla'The Winter House' is a new short story film and website that has been designed by Naomi Alderman who won the Orange Prize for New Writers in 2006 for her novel Disobedience.
'The Winter House' is aimed at helping young people identify with the short story form. The story, which plays on the website like an animated film and includes game-like interactive elements, is nonetheless a single narrative with a third-person narrator – the central character Millie, whose father has been murdered.
'The Winter House' hopes to encourage young adults to read stories online, by making them interesting and visual, so that being on a computer is an encouragement to reading, rather than as opposing it.
It’s also a useful teaching aid in subjects such as History, Citizenship, English and Media Studies, and there are some educational links on the site to help with this.
This story was commissioned by Booktrust and supported by Arts Council England, as part of the Story campaign.
The short story is based on the oldest and most enduring form of narrative in the world – that of the human desire to tell a story. The Story campaign is interested in… -
Self-Publishing in a Digital Age
Posted Thursday April 22nd 2010
by Anna Lewis
A guest-blog from Completely Novel's Anna Lewis discusses self-publishing in a digital ageThinking of self-publishing?
You’ve sent work out to agents and publishers and you’re yet to receive a positive response. With many literary agents receiving around six thousand manuscripts a year, you could be in for a long wait. Or, you could be one of the increasing number of people to take your book’s fate into your own hands and make the work available yourself.
Old-fashioned vanity publishing
Typically, vanity publishing involves paying large sums of money to a publisher for them to publish your work, rather than the traditional relationship of the publisher paying you. In the past, this was pretty much the only way that you could see your work in print without getting a traditional publishing contract if you didn’t have the time or the technical skills to prepare a manuscript and get it to a printing company. The biggest downside was that even after forking out loads of cash, it was still up to you to promote your book and sell the hundred or so copies that you had piled up to the ceiling,…
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Authors we love... Bernadette Mayer
Posted Monday April 19th 2010
by Anna MckerrowI first discovered Bernadette Mayer, one of the founders of Language Poetry, when I was studying for my MA a couple of years ago. We had started looking at poets using a 'processual' approach in their work, like Tina Darragh and Susan Howe – that is, poets creating work by setting themselves rules and processes to produce work with which would enable them to extract unexpected meaning from language, and treating language itself as material which holds, at best, only uncertainty and chaos.
It is, by the way, utterly topical at this moment to be writing about the Language Poets, considering that Rae Armantrout has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her ninth volume, Versed, for which she has also received the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Although she is (apparently) considered one of the most lyrical of the Language poets, her work still “embodies large questions and apprehensions in the conjunctions of individual words, and generates productive clashes from arrangements of small groups of phrases.”
Mayer’s poetry also likes to clash words up against each other as the result of anarchic processes, and much of her work is varied in form because…
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Authors we love... by Niven Govinden
Posted Wednesday April 14th 2010
by Niven GovindenIn our ongoing series, acclaimed author of Graffiti My Soul and We Are the New Romantics, Niven Govinden, discussed his love for John Cheever.
John Cheever’s always been my boy; something about him and the spirit of his work have long informed my writing life. The ‘Chekov of the suburbs’ tag is an oft-used one, and mostly uttered in cliché, but coming from the suburbs myself, I always saw the truth in this label. In his novels, short stories and non-fiction, Cheever always wrestled with a sense of place, (along with sexuality and class), where city freedoms vied for prominence over stultifying commuter life.
By day, and especially during cocktail hour, New York provided the breathing space and the answers that the manicured new towns of Connecticut couldn’t. He wrote of characters, choked with responsibilities, whose exhale moment came in downtown bars buying drinks for office girls. Only, back in the suburbs, late at night, the streets silent, neighbours, wife and children sleeping, looking out onto the gardens, watching the moonlight catching on the cold water pool, and washing away guilt with a series of nightcaps, there was a sense of peace and satisfaction. That this really was… -
Hi-ho, it's to London Book Fair we go...
Posted Monday April 12th 2010
by Carolyn KoussaThere’s been a flurry of activity in the Booktrust offices recently, and it can only mean one thing – London Book Fair is upon us once more. And what a programme it is looking set to be. London Book Fair describes itself as a ‘global marketplace’, and Booktrust’s involvement will be advocating this all-encompassing ethos, in our constant encouragement of all ages and cultures to engage with the written word.
Our programme of seminars spans the breadth of the world and the length of multiple platforms through which to access and promote reading and writing. From online channels for engaging the over-60s, to the need for children’s books in translation; from Simon Juden to Julia Donaldson, we’ve got all bases covered. With events throughout the day on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, there is sure to be one to fit you.
And of course, if the excitement gets too much, or if you just can’t wait any longer, come along to stand A557 for a browse and a chat – and with so much going on, who knows who you might meet there!
In the meantime, back to the flurry… see you next week!
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Get London Reading on your iPhone
Posted Friday April 9th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaExplore London's literary heritage for free with the Get London Reading app. Find books on your street, on your way to work, or in places of interest. Simply click the map to find books in your area. Use augmented reality to see exactly where the books are in 3D. Add books to your favourites, and search the books database. With over 500 books (and counting), you can explore London through it's books.
Feel free to add your own reviews for books in London here
Augmented Reality requires a 3GS iPhone.
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The Red Pen of Death
Posted Thursday April 8th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaMy wife, a teacher, was told recently to not mark homework in red anymore; it sends out a negative, potentially discouraging message to the pupil. I faced that very same potentially discouraging message when the first edit of my book came back from my editor covered in red pen. Well, not quite red pen, more like electronic red highlighting, because we are modern writers and have been using Google to edit.
At first I was mortified, thinking, why oh why have they decided to publish my book if they hate it so much. Each page had red on it, sometimes every paragraph. There were lines through entire chunks of passages, entire pieces of dialogue- gone, to the edited-offcuts shredder in the sky. I sucked it up, swallowed it up and waded through, picking at words, arguing my corner where I had to, acquiescing to a keener, sharper eye than my own where I needed to. Some of the changes were painful, others time-consuming but a trend started to emerge in my brain about halfway through the second editing session. I had overwritten a good book. You spend so long trying to find someone to put the book out that you…
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Kick-Ass
Posted Tuesday April 6th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaThere will be a time in every comic fan's life when a film adaptation of a much-loved character or graphic novel will come out and that fan will feel like they need to assert to the world (and their friendship group) that they knew about said character or graphic novel months, nay years, nay DECADES ago- which is why this blog is about Kick-Ass, the graphic novel by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr, and only a little bit about the Matthew Vaughan-directed film out last week (which I saw yesterday and loved).
The film of Kick-Ass does a great job of recreating the set-up for the book: teenage boy, invisible to girls (his only superpower) wonders why everyone wants to be Paris Hilton and not Spider-man. An internet purchase later, he dons a scuba suit and goes out looking to solve crime, gets smashed to a pulp and not learning from his lesson, tries again; before wading too deep into a mob vs avenging husband gang war. It's brilliant. For the first five issues.
The problem lies with the fact that by issue #6 of Kick-Ass, the film was being made, the last few issues were late… -
Evie Wyld's Facebook Writing Clinic
Posted Tuesday April 6th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaClick on to our Facebook page for your opportunity to ask Evie Wyld, our writer in residence and award-winning author of 'After the Fire, A Still Small Voice', anything you want about writing, be it short stories or novels or articles or your first novel. Please bear in mind she will not be able to critique individual manuscripts or short stories so if you have any general questions about style, structure, writing, getting published or her own writing journey, feel free to ask!
